A select look at the law faculty’s many accomplishments.
Monday, October 23, 2023

Awards & Appointments

  • Professor Robert Miller received one of The Heritage Foundation’s inaugural Freedom and Opportunity Academic Prizes. The award is presented to higher education professionals who contribute to research aligned with Heritage’s priority issue areas. 
  • Professor Christopher Odinet and his co-authors received the Grant Gilmore Award from the American College of Commercial Finance for their article “The Private Law of Stablecoins.” The award honors superior scholarship in commercial finance law.
  • Professor Anya Prince was named the William T. Barker Distinguished Visiting Professor of Insurance Law at Berkeley Law. Prince led the course titled Anti-Discrimination Policies in Insurance Law where she explored the pressure between the conceptions of social and actuarial fairness.

Scholarship

  • Professor Mihailis Diamantis, “Branding Corporate Criminals,” Fordham Law Review (forthcoming). The article highlights the shortcomings of corporate punishment, in which corporate criminals may view fines simply as costs of doing business.
  • Professor Diane Lourdes Dick, “Alliance Politics in Corporate Debt Restructuring,” Emory Bankruptcy Developments Journal (2023). The article analyzes “hostile restructuring,” a bankruptcy practice in which debtors drive a wedge through syndicated lender groups.
  • Professor Andy Grewal, “Billionaire Taxes and the Constitution,” Georgia Law Review (forthcoming). The article argues that the existing Sixteenth Amendment doctrine suffers from deep infirmities and theoretical inconsistencies.
  • Senior Associate Dean Emily Hughes, “State Constitutionalism and the Crisis of Excessive Punishment,” Iowa Law Review (2023). The article offers a doctrinal trajectory for state courts to interpret their constitutions to limit mass incarceration.
  • Professor Andrew Jordan, “The Promise of Contract Pluralism,” Connecticut Law Review (forthcoming). Through a series of examples, the article shows how features of promissory morality vary radically across different kinds of human relationships.
  • Professor Christopher Odinet, “Silencing Litigation Through Bankruptcy,“ Virginia Law Review (forthcoming). The article explores how bankruptcy proceedings cause harm to survivors by allowing cover-ups of mass torts.
  • Professors Daria Fisher Page and Brian Farrell, “One Crisis or Two Problems? Disentangling Rural Access to Justice and the Rural Attorney Shortage,” Washington Law Review (forthcoming). The article explains how the access to justice crisis and attorney shortage in rural areas are two distinct issues.
  • Professor Jason Rantanen, “Who Appeals (and Wins) Patent Infringement Cases?” Houston Law Review (2022). The article draws on a newly constructed multilayered relational dataset of patent infringement cases to assess hypotheses about different types of patent asserters and what happens in appeals of those cases. 
  • Professor Ryan Sakoda, “The Architecture of Discretion: Implications of the Structure of Sanctions for Racial Disparities,” Northwestern University Law Review (2023). The article studies a statewide probation reform that implemented swift and certain sanctions.
  • Professor Gregory Shill, “The Social Costs (and Benefits) of Dual-Class Stock,” Alabama Law Review (2023). The article debates whether dual-class stock is optimal for investors and is the first to identify the structure’s social costs as a critical issue.
  • Professor Sean Sullivan, “The Decline of Coordinated Effects Enforcement and How to Reverse It,” Florida Law Review (forthcoming). The article exposes a sharp decline in coordinated-effects merger enforcement and the threat this poses to competitive markets.
  • Professor Cristina Tilley, “The First Amendment and the Second Sex,” Arizona Law Review (2023). The article reviews nineteenth-century speech regulation and highlights miscalculations by a women-led group to create gender equality in speech.
  • Professor Shannon Roesler, “Constitutional Resilience,” Washington and Lee Law Review (forthcoming). The article applies resilience theory to constitutional governance structures and examines how recent Supreme Court decisions either disrupt or support governance doctrines that facilitate our ability to adapt to climate change.

National Media Coverage

  • Professor Diane Lourdes Dick quoted in “Bed Bath & Beyond Closing More Stores and Selling Stock to Avoid Bankruptcy” by USA Today: The share sale “is a lifeline,” said Diane Lourdes Dick, a law professor at the University of Iowa. “It can alleviate their immediate distress. But it isn’t addressing the underlying issues that have put the company into the position that it’s in.”
  • Professor Robert Miller quoted in “Elon Musk, Tesla Board Members to Defend CEO’s Pay in Court” by The Wall Street Journal: “I think if you offered this kind of package to the average public company CEO, they’d all say, ‘no way,’” said Robert Miller, a corporate law professor at the University of Iowa.
  • Professor Gregory Shill quoted in “Race, Class and Traffic Deaths” by The New York Times: “The engorgement of the American vehicle,” as Gregory Shill of the University of Iowa has called it, can kill pedestrians and people in smaller vehicles.
  • Professor Sean Sullivan quoted in “FTC Faces Uphill Battle in Microsoft/Activision Appeal” by Reuters: Antitrust scholar Sean Sullivan, who teaches at University of Iowa’s law school, said an appeals court can modify or throw out a lower court opinion based on “errors of law.” “But not every alleged error is an actual error,” Sullivan said. “And not every actual error compels intervention.”

Global Engagement

  • Professor César Rosado Marzán was appointed to the nine-member Labour Law Research Network Steering Committee (LLRN). The LLRN is one of the leading international organizations of labor and employment scholars.
  • Professor Chris Odinet was appointed an expert by the U.S. State Department to serve on the Digital Assets and Tokens Project. The project, run by the Hague Conference on Private International Law and The International Institute for the Unification of Private Law, focuses on digital asset transfers across international borders. 

2023 Faculty Promotions 

On the recommendation of Dean Kevin Washburn, Provost Kevin Kregel appointed five faculty members to named professorships in the College of Law. Professorships are awarded to faculty who, through their scholarship, have substantially altered the fields in which they work and have received national or international recognition from their scholarly peers.

  • Mihalis Diamantis: Ben V. Willie Professorship in Excellence 
  • Diane Lourdes Dick: Charles E. Floete Distinguished Professor of Law
  • Chris Odinet: Josephine R. Witte Professor of Law
  • Todd Pettys: renewed as H. Blair and Joan V. White Chair in Civil Litigation

Fellowships

  • Anya Prince: Joseph F. Rosenfield Fellow in Law
  • Gregory Shill: The Michael and Brenda Sandler Faculty Fellow in Corporate Law
  • Sean Sullivan: Bouma Fellow in Law
  • Cristina Tilley: The Claire Ferguson Carlson Fellow in Law

Read more about these distinguished faculty positions. 

New Faculty

  • Professor Bethany Berger is a nationally renowned scholar in property law, legal history, and federal Indian law. Before joining Iowa Law, she taught courses on American Indian Law, Property, Tribal Law, and Conflict of Laws at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Professor Berger brings a wealth of experience, having served as a judge for the Southwest Intertribal Court of Appeals and as a visiting professor at esteemed institutions like Harvard Law School and the University of Michigan Law School. She has also contributed to legal successes with her co-authored amicus briefs in five U.S. Supreme Court cases. Her tenure at Iowa Law begins fall 2024.
  • Professor Vinita Singh (18JD) joins Iowa Law as a Faculty Fellow. She was previously a transactional attorney focused on structuring investment platforms and fundraising for private equity and venture capital funds. Her expertise extends to national security law, where she earned her Master of Laws from Georgetown University Law Center in May 2023. With an interest in the convergence of business and national security, Singh explores critical areas like the security implications of international trade, financial transactions, and foreign investment in the United States.

 

Data-Driven Decisions

The use of data to inform court decisions has a long history. However, with the advent of big data and enhanced computing power, the legal landscape has rapidly evolved. Risk-assessment algorithms now play a role in jurisdictions nationwide, influencing decisions on pre-trial release, probation conditions, and prison security-level placement. Relying on these algorithms has raised concerns among scholars and policymakers due to the potential perpetuation of biases. Current research seeks to understand how data analytics can be integrated into decision-making processes while minimizing adverse effects and optimizing benefits.

Professor Ryan Sakoda is using data amassed by the Administrative Office of the U.S. District Courts to analyze the characteristics of federal criminal cases dating back to 1994. Leveraging this information, Sakoda examines the impact of different forms of criminal defense representation on crucial case outcomes, such as trial decisions, conviction likelihood, and sentence severity. His research sheds new light on the dynamics that shape justice outcomes, paving the way for a more profound understanding of the underlying factors.